


Hungry Eyes

by LLReid



Category: Queen of Thieves (Voltage Visual Novel)
Genre: Canon Lesbian Relationship, Established Relationship, F/F, London, The Gilded Poppy, dyslexic writer, just fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-07 05:30:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21452806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: Katerina draws Vivienne like one of her french girls.One shot inspired by the song ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen.
Relationships: Vivienne Tang/Katerina Leyva, Vivienne Tang/Main Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 51





	Hungry Eyes

Vivienne could feel the colour rising to her cheeks as she lounged across the couch in the bedroom that she and Katerina shared. The younger woman had arranged her exactly how she wanted her, how she needed her, for her part of their latest job. It was hardly the first time that Vivienne had played the part of artist’s muse, yet something about it felt different than how all the other times had felt. She couldn’t pin point exactly what it was, but something deep within her heart refused to be silenced.

Ever the professional, her sweet Katya was focused on her canvas and probably oblivious to the fact Vivienne felt more like a live wire than she ever had before. Thick brown hair was piled up and out of the way of her captivating facial features into a messy bun, with the strand at the nape of her neck that she always somehow missed hanging free. The big brown eyes that the seductress adored shone with the intensity of her focus, of her passion, yet somehow still managed to hold more kindness than Vivienne had ever experienced from anyone else. She was intoxicating. Without even trying to seduce her, Katerina was somehow holding her heart in her hands.

Out of the corner of her eyes, Vivienne spotted the tube of lipstick that she had once used to poison her girlfriend sitting on the vanity across the room. Instantly, her heart ached and she had to fight to conceal the nausea that began to brew deep within the pit of her stomach. It was only after using the lipstick on Katerina back in Paris that she’d begun to feel anything at all besides the rush of adrenaline that her lifestyle provided, that she’d begun to realise just how many people she’d managed to hurt in less than three decades of life. She was fairly certain there were people serving death sentences in prison for far less than all she’d done. 

It was one thing to make a mistake one time; it was another thing entirely to keep making it. For many years she believed that she had known what would happen if she let herself get close to a woman, if she allowed herself to start to believe that they loved her: she’d be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed alive, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there, she had thought. Either that, or she’d confide in them and somehow only add to their problems. 

Until meeting Katerina all she’d ever really had was herself, and that had sort of sucked because she had been raised to be far less than reliable. 

Less reliable than anyone she thought she was protecting herself from, anyway.

She watched her girlfriend as she did her thing and she couldn’t help but smile, as she realised whilst watching her so intently that she had never been closer to another person than she was to Katerina. She had come to see, too, that all of the characters she’d crafted and who she really was were motivated by the same inspiration. Whether it was the power that they sought, or revenge, or love — well, those were all just different forms of hunger. 

The bigger the hole inside a person, the more desperate they eventually became to fill it.

Nobody had ever broken down every single one of her carefully crafted masks and walls, nobody had ever seen her for what she really was and decided to stay. And somehow, despite being more committed to her than she’d ever been to another person, she felt far freer than she had done when she was single. To her freedom had always been comparable to the frail and fragile neck of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It was the sound of her voice, without anyone drowning her out or telling her to quieten down. It was having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of her newfound and treasured freedom, hope beat: a continuous pulse of possibility that seeped into everything she did.

Katerina furrowed her brow, deep in focus. She pulled the most adorable of faces whenever she was completely engrossed in whatever it was she was creating, yet Vivienne had never mentioned them to her as she knew that she was oblivious to the fact that her ‘zone’ provided her with so much entertainment. She could find herself getting just as lost in the sight of her as she had done as a child when she’d watch her prized collection of Disney VHS tapes. Yet Vivienne now knew that there were no fairy tales in real life, no glittering Cinderella stories. She knew now that the lowly peasant that seems to rise to the top of the world was really a queen in her own right all along, all she needed was someone capable and patient enough to show her.

“Babe, you know if you wanna go do what you need to get done today then you can. I’ve taken enough photos and gotten enough done with you sitting here that I can probably finish up without you having to throw away an entire afternoon,” Katerina said, sweetly.

“What else would I be doing?,” Vivienne smirked, before taking a sip of the bubbling glass of champagne she’d been working on since sitting down. She did it artlessly, seeing no point in attempting to make day drinking whilst laying back on the couch a seductive experience...it really wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded. Not when she’d eaten her way through almost an entire jumbo sized box of creamy Belgian chocolates shaped like little seashells by herself in less than two hours and felt far too bloated to move.

“Being gay, doing crime. You know, the usual.”

She huffed in amusement. “That would require putting on clothes and venturing outdoors in these ungodly temperatures without your company to make the cold bearable. I can be bothered with neither at the moment.”

“Regretting those chocolates already, huh?”

“Absolutely not,” she lied, smirking over the rim of her glass the way she did everything else — with passion and excess. 

Katerina smirked right back at her, knowing the truth but being far too sweet to call her out on her BS. She padded barefoot across the glossy wooden floors and stopped at Vivienne’s side to adjust her position however she needed. Slender fingers carded their way through sleek raven hair and then caressed her chiselled jawline. Confidence and control ripped off of the American’s body in waves, the timidness of youth that had been there in the beginning having long since melted away. She kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it, the taste of minty lip balm leaving a pleasant sensation on Vivienne’s lips. She pulled back slightly, to look into her eyes as she pulled her onto her lap, in the hopes she’d take a break to satisfy Vivienne’s constantly growing need for even the simplest of affections.

Being so much smaller than her, Katerina fit in her lap comfortably and Vivienne could hold her there for hours, which suited them both just fine as they were both incredibly physical people. It continued to baffle her that she’d gotten to that point after making a series of mistakes that she considered to be the biggest mistakes of her life, and even though she knew that the way she’d gotten Katerina was wrong some small part of her had stopped thinking it was all a mistake and only saw it as the best thing that ever could have happened to her.

Outside it was raining. The kind of rain that came down so heavy it sounded like the shower was running, even though it was turned off — bloody typical English weather, according to Jett. It was the kind of rain that made Vivienne think of her father’s stories of the dams and flash floods that filled his boyhood. The sky was the pale gray that made you think of nightfall and silver bullets and the edge of winter. The colour that filled the sky entirely before it was torn in half by viscous strikes of lightening. The kind of rain that somehow told her to crawl back into bed despite it being two in the afternoon, as if the sheets hadn’t already long since lost her body heat from the night before. Yet Katerina made London seem infinitely less dismal than it actually was. Home was no longer where she happened to find herself. It was who she was with.

“What’s on your mind, Vivi? You’ve been biting down on your bottom lip on and off for a bit.”

The nickname made her smile as she pressed a chaste kiss against the sensitive pulse point just below the right hand side of her jaw. Plenty of people had called her ‘Vivi’ in the past, yet somehow it sounded different in Katerina’s mouth. It felt different, too. She was the only one for whom her bedroom didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly as stupid as she felt most of the time.

“I don’t think I tell you how much you mean to me often enough. I’m not— I’ve never— This is all still very new to me, real relationships, that is.” She took one of the wispy strands of hair that had escaped from her bun and twirled it around her fingers instead of fiddling with her ring as she tried to piece together what she was trying to say without tying herself in knots. “I isolated myself for a long time, because I thought that it would hurt less than allowing anyone close enough to truly get to know me.”

“I know you did, sweetheart, and I know real relationships are new to you...but I promise you’re doing a damn good job.”

The tiniest hint of a smile twitched at the corners of her lips, yet she felt suddenly far more vulnerable than she wanted to feel. She muscled through it, determined to push past every one of her natural instincts to have a real conversation with her girlfriend. “Even after everything in New York, the incident in Paris, and then almost fleeing again in Venice?”

“Even after New York, Paris, and Venice.” Katerina’s expression softened as she caressed her face in that special way that no one ever had before her. “I've thought about all the things I could have done differently, that we both could have done differently, and if it would have led to another outcome. But thinking doesn't change anything, does it? That's what I think love is, when your hindsight's twenty-twenty, and you still wouldn't change a damn thing. Things happened the way they were supposed to, the way that they needed to, for us to be in the here and now.”

“Just because you try to leave someone doesn't mean you ever let them go. Even when you couldn't see me, you knew deep down I was still there...didn’t you? You knew why I did what I did. I was sick and tired of people in my life abandoning me and lying to me, and I thought that you would be just one more. So I did what was easiest, when I feel like I'm in danger of being fooled or left behind. I made sure I was the one to walk away first.”

Katerina nodded. “Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you can really remember its value.”

“And you’re happy? With the Poppy? With...with me?”

“I love my life and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Granted, nothing has turned out the way I expected it to...but that’s not a bad thing.”

“It’s not?,” she echoed, her tone only slightly teasing.

“Where I’m from daily life is just a series of monotonous actions that people carry out each day by rote to distract themselves from noticing how much time is passing them by. They throw themselves into their jobs, where they make money for someone else in a field they’re not even slightly passionate about and interact with people they hate everyday. They fill up their gas tanks and do the weekly grocery shop so that the weeks all look the same on the surface level. Then, one day, they look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, they realise there is less of their life left than what they’ve already lived...and only when this realisation hits, do they actually start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space?” She took a deep breath and shrugged her shoulders. “Some people let this realisation guide them, I guess. They book trips to Europe, they learn how to sculpt, they skydive. They try to pretend it’s not almost over. But some just go on filling up their gas tanks and doing the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off. Some of us never learn. And some of us learn earlier than others. I consider myself lucky to have figured out the true meaning of life a good forty-odd years faster than the average person I once knew.”

Vivienne felt her jaw slackening in awe before she could stop it, before she could even think of how to respond to what Katerina had just said to her. It was not compassion that led to Vivienne’s change of heart and personal growth, and it was not kindness. It was realising that, against all odds, she had many things in common with her dear Katya. Like Vivienne, Katerina had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't ever possibly become. And sometimes, all it really took to become human again was someone patient enough to see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

She took her girlfriend’s lips on hers and kissed her slowly, savouring the moment. There was a certain magic to their intimacy, a world built of soft sighs and skin that felt stronger than iron whenever they were together. She touched her and found that even something as innocent as the lacing of their fingers could raise all the hairs on the back of her neck and make her blood beat faster. She noticed that there was a pattern to the way she and Katerina came together in their quiet little moments. She had not even realised it for many months, but their bodies were choreographed: a single touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A kiss, break away, then a longer one. It was a dance routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. Not at all. It was just the way they’d learned to fit together.

“My life is so much better because you are in it,” Vivienne confessed against her lips. 

She rested her brow against Katerina’s and held her as close as she were physically able. She was the first woman she had truly fallen deeply in love with and she had stolen her heart. She was the first woman with whom sex felt like making love, even whilst they were doing things that many would deem unsavoury, and she had stolen her soul. Part of her screamed that she was damned, and she had never been happier. Truly. Love was not what she had expected it to be. She had imagined being drunk on happiness at every moment, but the truth was, she worried all the time. Was her darling Katya ill? Hurt? Might she meet someone else? There was a moment when she realised she’d gotten everything she wished for. And right on its heels was the understanding that meant she had so much more to lose.

“You make my life so much better, too, Vivi. I don’t ever want you to doubt that.” She leaned back and kissed the very tip of Vivienne’s nose. “You’re enough, alright? You’re always more than enough.”

“Stay with me forever?”

“Always, Vivienne. Always.”


End file.
